How to Make a Frequency Table

Series Summary

Mathematics is the body of knowledge and the academic discipline that studies concepts such as quantity, structure, space and change. Mathematics education is a term that refers both to the practice of teaching and learning mathematics, as well as to a field of scholarly research on this practice. At different times and in different cultures and countries, mathematics education has attempted to achieve a variety of different objectives, including the teaching of basic numeracy skills to students and teaching both practical and abstract mathematics. In this free video series, a tutor provides advice for solving math problems and studying for tests. Discover how to simplify complex fractions and factorials, how to subtract compound fractions and how to solve algebraic ratios. Learn about solving word problems, calculating the area of a shape and how grading curves work. Improve math skills to score higher on tests with these tips.

Video Transcript

"Let's take a look at a frequency table. So, let's draw a table here. So, a frequency table gives you a certain piece of data. It tells you how many of those pieces you have. So let's say we're talking about, we've got a group of students in a room, and we want to know how many siblings they have. So this is number of siblings; so let's say somebody might have zero siblings - siblings means brothers or sisters, by the way. So let's say somebody might have 0, 1, 2, 3, 4 or even 5 siblings. Let's say that in this particular classroom, that's how many people, how many siblings somebody had. So this side is going to tell us the number of students in the room who satisfy that category. So let's say in this classroom there were three kids that had no other siblings; they were only children. There were two kids that had one sibling, three kids that had two siblings. There was one person who had three siblings, nobody had four siblings, and there was one person who had five siblings. This is called a frequency table. Sometimes it gives people a little trouble, because they're not sure what to make of these numbers. So this is the way we interpret it, once again: this tells me that, in this category of 0 siblings, 1, 2, 3, 4, or 5 siblings, that's the category, and this tells me the frequency - that's what that word means - or number of people in the room who fit that category. So three people had 0, two had 1, three had 2, 1. So if somebody, you were using this data table for homework and it said how many students in the room had 2 siblings, you'd look and say 3 students had 2 siblings. And that's the way you use the frequency table."